


Twenty Things Phil Coulson Tells His Lover In Confidence When They Are In Bed One Night

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Coulson-centric, Dialogue Heavy, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, Phil Coulson Feels, you will pry bisexual!Coulson headcanon out from my cold dead hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-17
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2018-03-18 09:17:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3564323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things he never told Skye before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twenty Things Phil Coulson Tells His Lover In Confidence When They Are In Bed One Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hamsterfactor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hamsterfactor/gifts).



**1.**

He takes after his mother. His father was wiry, with light-brown hair and a charming smile thanks to a couple of crooked teeth – he doesn't look like him at all. He takes after his mother, dark-haired and solid-looking. So much that when he was a kid friends and relatives often made the joke that his father was not his real father. The family stories say that it never bothered either of his parents. When he grew up he still looked a lot like his mother, maybe a bit too much, soft features and a girl's mouth, that wasn't exactly easy at a certain age. It was comforting – it still is, that's the first secret he wants his lover to know – looking in the mirror and finding bits of her mother there, specially when he misses her. He has always looked strikingly like her.

("Baby pictures?"

"Come on. They have to be somewhere."

"Somewhere. But I don't think we've gotten to that point."

"Then – what point is it? This?"

"Do you have baby pictures?"

"Ew, no. I burned all my pictures when I changed my name and erased my identity."

"That's extreme. Don't you ever regret it?"

"Sometimes. Not at the beginning and not now, but sometimes in between I regretted it. But it felt necessary when I did it. And everything I did back then it ended up leading me to this point. Whatever this point is. I can't exatly regret that.")

 

 

**2.**

The first time he saw his lover he felt attracted to her. He didn't immediately realized how young she was. It wasn't until later that he understood that she was vulnerable and alone in the world. All notion of attraction had to be forgotten. The more he talked to her the more he understood hurt should not come to her, at least not by him. He understood there are things in the universe one has to be careful with, not because they are fragile, but because anything else would be unfair, even unkind. He didn't want to be unkind to her just because right after he met her his future lover made him smile, astonished him, frustrated him and gave him a hope he didn't know was missing. But then after everything that happened between them he remembers that first impression with relish, those first days of their acquaintance, when he looked at her with a sense of romance in his eyes. He wonders if she saw something like that, the first time his lover looked at him.

("That's a really difficult question."

"Did you? Were you?"

"I guess. You were sort of –"

"Impressive?"

"You wish. Dashing at most. But I couldn't think like that, couldn't allow myself to, you were..."

"A mark?"

"Yeah. I was supposed to suck you in, no the other way around."

"It's a tie, then.")

 

 

**3.**

He never talks about his father but he will talk about his father with his lover. His lover never pushes, she knows how painful it is for him.

He believes his death ended up killing his mother. Not in a romantic way, no, it was a matter of economics. If she hadn't worked so hard, if she hadn't wasted all her money and energies in paying off her husband's bad investements, and bringing up a kid on her own, maybe she wouldn't have died so quick. He knows his mother's illness had nothing to do with his father's death, but the bastard left her alone. That's the thing he can't forgive – that he left them alone.

He has never been like his father. He already told his lover how he took after her mother. Like him her mother was poor, uneducated, sharp. Like his lover she was brave, principled, sad. Don't they say people always try to replicate their parents in all romantic relationships? Now his lover is laughing, between her pillow and his shoulder, at the Oedipal connotations of his words. It's funny, when you look at the picture they make, he agrees.

He always gets distracted by his mother but he was telling his lover about his father, this time.

He was a popular guy, that's what he heard, many many times. A real guy's guy. He was always the center of everything, the life of the party, they said about his father, and he tells his lover this. But he could never be like that, like his father was.

("But you are like that. You light up a room when you come in."

"You're very benevolent."

"No. I see you as you are. Even if you can't."

"I don't have a self-esteem problem. You have a bias problem."

"I'm not trying to stroke your ego here."

"Pun intended?"

"Very much.")

 

 

**4.**

His last lover before his new lover believes he is dead. This is not a secret – his new lover knows that. She knows many things about his previous lover, about their affair. What was a secret – until now, until he's lulled into intimate confidences by post-orgasm endorphins and the smell of her bed and the softness of her dark skin – is that he has no intention of setting the record straight. He is a coward, for the most part. He thinks it'd be embarrassing, specially now. Unfair to his last lover, and maybe to his new lover. It would onlu cause everybody pain.

("I'm not jealous. I feel bad for her. You knew I wouldn't agree."

"I left it go on for too long. It's too late."

"It's not. I would want to know, I'm sure she does too. She loved you. She laughed at your jokes."

"You laugh at my jokes."

"My point exactly."

"..."

"Why did you let it go on for so long? It would have been easier, sooner. And don't give me that crap about how you couldn't stay, because I know it's something more than that."

"Until recently I didn't think it was permanent."

"What? You being alive wasn't permanent? Oh. _Oh_. You thought it would wear off, didn't you."

"Maybe."

"And now?"

"Now I'm here for the long run, you know that."

"So. You have to tell her."

"I know that.") 

 

 

**5.**

His childhood wasn't all that bad. The typical one-parent household melancholy. The poverty didn't bother him. The latter part was really good. He was happy, his mother was happy too, despite the hard work, they were a team. The teenage years, he felt at home in those. He did the whole punk scene. It was the era he was given. Not much choice in the matter. A matter of history. He embraced it joyfully. The clothes. The make-up. The music. Kissing girls, kissing boys. Telling his mother all about his exploits, talking in the kitchen until three in the morning, his mother coming back from work, him coming back from some concert. He even wore an earring in his left ear for a few years.

("Really? Yes. Yes, I can feel where the piercing used to be right there, it's closed now but I can feel it. Amazing. I would have never called it."

"It was many years ago."

"You could wear it again. If you wanted."

"I don't think it's proper for the Director of SHIELD to wear an earring."

"There's nothing proper about what you just did to me."

"That's because I'm not the Director of SHIELD right now."

"Mmm... I like that... but if you want to wear it, when we are alone. I can pierce your ear again. I used to do that for my friends – I have steady hands."

"You piercing my ear? That's enticing."

"I promise I won't hurt you."

"Okay. I'll think about it.")

 

 

**6.**

He'll never completely overcome the consequences of having the GH drug in his blood. Like an itch he can't hope to scratch his body misses the carving. Even when he is with his lover – or specially when he is with her lover, because her body contains the same song – the ghost of that old craving comes back to the tips of his fingers, specially late when he is half-asleep and content in his lover's arms, when his guard is down, that's when it comes back, an echo inside his muscles, like melody stuck in the back of his mind he can never completely get rid of.

("You think... I make you worse?"

"No. It's nothing. Just... something between a bad dream and a bad memory."

"You never told me before."

"That why I'm telling... you now."

"You should have told me before."

"You don't make me worse. I was afraid you might think that. It's not real. It's just muscle memory stuck somewhere ugly."

"I'm sorry."

"Why? You didn't put a Chitauri sceptre through my heart. You didn't pump me full of alien blood against my will. You didn't replace my memories."

"No. But I still can feel sorry that it ever happened to you."

"Mmm... that's nice."

"You're okay now, right?"

"Tonight I'm fine.")

 

 

**7.**

When did he start making those rules? When did it start feeling like it was trouble, getting involved with people he worked with? Not in the Academy, there was romance then, he had like three lovers the first year alone, among his classmates. There was that time he had sex with one of his instructors, it was two weeks after his mother's funeral. He didn't think those rules were even necessary, they were for losers, they weren't cool. It was going on missions, he thinks, leaving the safe environment of the Academy and training. It was losing people. Yes, it was when he start losing people. When people started dying around him and older agents insisted it was normal, but how could that be normal. It was seeing people he loved die. It was becoming team leader. It was losing people he sent straight into danger. The more responsibility, the harder it was forging those attachments. That's when he understood those rules, how wise they were in all their cowardice.

("So you stopped letting people in, too."

"In a way. I didn't want to complicate things at work."

"But outside work, it wasn't really real, it was a safe fantasy."

"..."

"What?"

"Why didn't I meet you ten years ago? You could have explained all these things to me."

"Well, ten years ago I was seventeen, so..."

"You know what I mean."

"I do. But – the thing is ten years ago I was also like you then, I didn't let anyone in either."

"What changed?"

"I did."

"Uh."

"What changed for you?"

"You.") 

 

 

**8.**

He's really glad he broke those self-imposed rules as well. He was never a strong enforcer for anyone else – he sort of regrets how lax he was, with Ward and May, but he also realizes there's no way he could have known – and when the opportunity arose it made sense that he wouldn't be too hard on himself. Of course it took the better part of two years and his lover becoming an actual superhero with the power to destroy whole continents for him to relax, which might sound ironic, but it makes sense to him. After all he was a mere newborn when he met his lover, if we are being technical. He wasn't fully-formed when they met.

("What a load of crap."

" _Excuse me_?"

"You didn't let yourself break the rules. I broke them for you. I made the first move."

"Of course. You had to. I'm not an asshole."

"The point is you'd still be congratulating me on my missions, all professional and lame, and living out your sad lonely existence if it weren't for me."

"I would be a lot of things if it weren't for you. Dead, mainly. You can't hold that against me."

"You didn't break any rule. I _made_ your sorry, sexy ass break them."

"But I'd like to believe my sexy ass would have gotten there on its own, you're just too quick for us."

"Okay, the jury will concede the point, on a technicality, but don't get fresh.")

 

 

**9.**

He became excellent at inhabiting a role that wasn't the one under his own skin. He was Nick Fury's best PR weapon, the affable face of a sketchy super-secret organization that spied on the population for their own good. At least that's what he became, eventually, more than a real agent. A middleman at most. A trick to confuse the curious. He wasn't born into it. Part of it was natural – you make people feel at ease, Fury told him once, in the Academy – but mostly it was a pure construct. A person made from scratch. It took time and effort and it took quite a bit of money. He put all those shiny profiling skills that had gained him such praise among his instuctors to good use. He learned how to dress. How to order in restaurants. He learned the mannierisms. The upper class manierisms (people get more comfortable if they think you have money). He perfected the details over the years. So much that he started believing it, believing the details were him. Could he remember a time when he didn't know all this, what kind of wine he should order on a date? He even learned how to talk. Re-learned how to talk. His real voice just was _adequate_.

("You still have it though. The accent?"

"Not really. The odd word will come, sounding like before, but I don't have any control over it. I lost it too well. Now I can't turn it on."

"You don't sound happy about it."

"I didn't think I would miss that part of myself. I miss it."

"You wanted to do a good job."

"I thought it was okay to sacrifice something so small as an accent. It wasn't."

"You don't have to make those sacrifices. Ever again."

"I wonder."

"I don't.")

 

 

**10.**

He thought she was dead, for a moment, when he went downstairs and found her in that wine cellar. She was so cold to the touch. His blood-stained clothes, he wonders what he did with them. He doesn't wonder – he's ashamed to tell his lover he didn't throw them straight away, didn't wash them straight away. He couldn't.

("You've never actually talked to me about it. About the fact that you were the one who found me there."

"I didn't want to talk about it."

"I'm really, really sorry."

"You don't get to apologize. You were the one who got shot. Because of me."

"You've been keeping that one buried for a while, uh, Director?"

"I know it wasn't my fault. But I know it was because of me."

"Well, my father has tried to kill you a couple of times because of me, so we're even.")

 

 

**11.**

He's allergic to tetra– his lover doesn't think she can repeat it, a drug, a sort of antibiotic, he'll write it down for her.

("It's important that you know."

"Why?"

"You are my emergency contact."

"Since when? And how can you just say it like that? That kind of stuff you have to ease people into it."

"Does it bother you?"

"No but... Why me?"

"I don't have anyone else."

"You have loads of people there for you, don't be – unfair."

"Okay. I have loads of people. I don't have any other you."

"Fine, I won't let doctors kill you. Happy?"

"Very. So who's your emergency contact?"

"You, of course, since like forever.")

 

 

**12.**

The honest truth is that he can't think himself the Director of SHIELD, not really. He feels like a placeholder, something to keep the place running until someone better comes along. Like a substitute teacher. He wouldn't want his lover to think he feels pity for himself – he always admired substitute teachers. And it's not like he feels like a fraud everytime someone calls him _Director_ or that he hates it – sometimes he loves it when his lover says it and he knows he shouldn't admit to such a thing, to getting aroused in the middle of a mission, the middle of danger, even – but _Director_ is for Fury, it always was, and he feels too close to his team, too intimate, to draw such a line, to keep them at arms's length with such a word. He doesn't understand "Director" in any other way, and that's why he can't see himself in the sound.

("I don't think you have to _feel_ like a Director to be a good Director. Maybe it just works anyway."

"Do you think I'm a good Director?"

"How can you ask me that?"

"Maybe I need to hear it."

"Now _that_ is something you never told me before."

"Maybe I didn't want to ask the one person whose opinion matters the most."

"I think you could be smarter. I think you should know that if you weren't a good Director I would be the first person in the whole world to tell you so."

"Even if we are –"

"Specially because _we are_.")

 

 

**13.**

Things had begun to go awry before he died. He knows his lover doesn't want him to talk about that – dying – but he knows she can stand it. He had begun questioning things before that. Perhaps it started in New Mexico. Perhaps it was Tahiti Project, though he can't remember what that felt like, only bits of essential information recovered, not what he thought at the end of the day when the work was done. Perhaps it was the fact that he had started an affair with the victim in a SHIELD case what made him wonder what kind of man he was. Or it was watching Fury mess around with the Tesseract, and how far the man could go to protect this planet, how admirable and terrifying that drive could be. The truth is that he was beginning to dislike the person he had become, through all those years of polishing exterior and inside for SHIELD. Person is not the word, it's persona. It had begun to crack right before his death. But he can never be sure, so many memories of that time are missing now, or replaced, how could he be sure, really sure, unless he takes a holiday in the memory machine to recover all the lost days, and even so. Something would always be missing.

His lover cringes at the mention of the memory machine.

("I still think we should destroy the freaking thing."

"I'm afraid to. We might need it one day. It's something quite powerful."

"That's more Nick than Phil."

"You don't know the man. You're being unkind."

"I'm sorry. No – _no_. I'm not sorry. We should still destroy that horrible thing."

"Maybe we should talk about that in my office, during office hours."

"We work for SHIELD, all hours are office hours. You've never cared about boundaries before."

"I don't want anything from out there to interfere with what we have in here."

"Do you think what we have in here is so fragile that it can't stand an honest discussion, our differences about –?"

"Of course not."

"Do you think what we have in here is not exactly what we have _out there_? Because it's one and the same.") 

 

 

**14.**

He's not good at compartimentalizing, that's his whole next point, prompted by his lover's defiance. His lover, having been brave all her life, does not understand what it feels like to be a coward. He's not good at compartimentalization, that's why he ended up following his lover to certain death to an ancient alien city without really knowing what it meant. 

("Yes, you're a bit overdramatic."

"Because you are always so reasonable."

"If you are talking about that time I crashed a car – I _never_ crashed a car, for the record, I swear. I didn't steal that car, or the other one."

"I see."

"Fine, but I didn't crash it _because_ I wanted to get into your pants."

"No? I'd rather think that was the reason."

"Okay, okay.")

 

 

**15.**

He tells her his middle name. Which should be easy enough to do, it's in his file, his lover probably knows it anyway, but it's not easy. It gets him thinking it's not even on his gravestone - yes, he's morbid, he checked.

("That's a big trust thing." 

"My middle name. You are really humble in your expectation." 

"I was expecting something more dramatic, though. Like a woman's name, or maybe a Julius."

"Sorry to disappoint." 

"Your father's name?" 

"My father's father name. Since my mom got to pick the Phillip." 

"She picked well." 

"You think?" 

"I mean, no, Phillip is a super lame name, but I have gotten used to it. I don't think any other name would do." 

"I have gotten used to Skye, too. I like it." 

"Well, I chose it." 

"That's why I like it.")

 

 

**16.**

He thought she had perished, back in that city. She wasn't his lover then yet the loss felt very much like the loss of a lover. He didn't want to think about that. And when she came back – a miracle – he didn't want to go back to those feelings. It was enough that she was – a miracle – alive.

("You really are afraid of people leaving you alone, aren't you?"

"..."

"You don't have to worry about that with me."

"You might not have a say in the matter."

"Hello, my name is Skye, I think we have met before. Of course I have a say in the matter. And I wouldn't. Leave you alone."

"Thank you."

"Hey, don't thank me. I expect the same treatment. No leaving. No pushing me away. And not dying. The last one is very important."

"I'll do my best. I can't think you're very fond of people leaving either."

"You can get used to it. And that's no good either. It messes you up."

"You expect me to leave."

"I don't. A little voice inside my head does. I tend not to pay attention."

"Maybe I can help you... silence it."

"Maybe if we try together...")

 

 

**17.**

He was never afraid of his lover, not even in those first days when she couldn't control her powers. Something inside him made it impossible to believe she could ever hurt those she loved. And he is afraid of admitting he was never scared, because she was, his lover was terrified for a long time, and it feels unfair or hurtful to say this now that things are better, because he would have loved her anyway but he loves her power too. 

("I didn't know but I'm not surprised."

"You're not?"

"Come on. You have a thing for superheroes."

"I do not have a th – You're okay with it?"

"I'm okay with my boyfriend thinking my powers are cool? Yes, I'm okay."

"... _Boyfriend_."

"Oh, god, you really are bad at compartimentalizing, come here.")

 

 

**18.**

He doesn't think this is a good idea, this between him and his lover. He has seen it crash and burn too many times. This life – that's the choice one makes. You can't have simple, happy things like the rest of the world. He still doesn't think it's a good idea, messing with what they already had, that very important connection that was there since the moment he first saw his lover. Messing with their so important job.

He doesn't think it's a good idea, which is a funny thing to tell his lover as she traces the curve of his throat with her mouth, her teeth, as he kisses his chest, his scar, his stomach as he shivers into the touch dropping downward.

("You can stop any time you want. If you really think this a bad idea."

"I chose this. Even if I think it's a bad idea. Even if it really _is_ a bad idea. I choose this. That's worth the risk."

"Is this worth the risk?"

" _That_ is definitely worth the risk.")

 

 

**19.**

He loves her.

("I kinda figured that one out already."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, subtle guy."

"How long?"

"When I got back from training, a month ago. You looked like you had had the most miserable time without me."

"I did have the most miserable time without you.")

 

 

**20.**

It was more than missing her. He thought she might never come back. He thought that perhaps he had made a mistake, letting her go. Or maybe the mistake was before that, when he got attached. The mistake was letting someone in. And that's why he thinks this is a bad idea – his lover reminds him he has told her this already, no repeats – not because of compartimentalization or because he's the Director or because of professional consequences. And it's not because he is sending her to danger out there in the field every day. It's because if it doesn't work out he would miss her too much, because he doesn't think he could stand it. Is it really worth the risk? He was so sure minutes ago.

("So you're just a coward."

"I told you that already."

"Then what does that make me?"

"Brave enough for both of us."

"I think you're wrong. No, not about me. About you. I think you are wrong and I'm going to show you."

"Show me?"

"Show you. It's time we stopped talking for tonight.")


End file.
